Hacker News: isahers

New comment by isahers in "OpenAI fires three safety researchers for "mishandling research information""

isahers — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:27:49 +0000

I think that 2 things can be true at once: OpenAI doesn't care enough about safety, and these researchers violated the terms of their employment by sharing proprietary information they were not authorized to. IMO safety is a lost cause unless we somehow agree with China to halt model development. Think its pretty clear they violated the terms of their employment, otherwise they would be suing (California labor laws are very employee friendly), and to be quite frank none of what they are doing is particularly important in the grand scheme of safety, which requires geopolitical changes well beyond their power. OpenAI is also pretty scummy though and are obviously not in the right morally even if they are legally.

New comment by isahers in "The return-to-the-office trend backfires"

isahers — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:38:19 +0000

This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines that don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google). Either way surprising findings to me!

New comment by isahers in "Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company, reorganises teams"

isahers — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:51:18 +0000

The decision to buy scale and put Wang in charge was a bad one, but I think people are too focused on the $14B (which doesn't matter to Meta in the slightest) instead of the actual logic behind the purchase. Meta didn't need more labeled data, and a data labeling expert is not the person to lead your AI initiatives. I think spending $14B to try and get ahead in the AI race is a great idea, and Meta should be spending more money (there is some level of existential risk if they don't play in this market), but spending it on companies like Scale makes no sense.

New comment by isahers in "SkillsBench: Benchmarking how well agent skills work across diverse tasks"

isahers — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 22:04:12 +0000

Yeah I care about LLM's generating skills after attempting tasks and learning lessons from those attempts, not before attempting a task for the first time. This result seems a little silly and detached from the reality of how skills are "auto-generated" in the real world.

New comment by isahers in "AI optimism is a class privilege"

isahers — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:58:01 +0000

I disagree with most of this article. Disclaimer: I'm a junior engineer and I believe both that: 1. AI is going to take my job, 2. AI is going to do incredible good for the world.

I don't see how these are distinct. It's a technology shift, of course it's going to make certain jobs obsolete - that's how technology shifts work.

I'm not going to go through every quote I disagree with, but unlike some AI negativity discourse (some of which I agree with btw, being an optimist doesn't mean being irrational) this just reads as old man yells at cloud. Mainly because the author doesn't understand the technology, and doesn't understand the impact.

The author clearly does not understand model capabilities (seems to be in the camp that these are just "prediction machines") as they claim it's unreasonable to expect models to "develop presently impossible capabilities". This is not at all supported by prior model releases. Most, if not all, major releases have displayed new capabilities. There are a lot more misconceptions on ability, but again not going to go through all of them.

The author also doesn't understand the impact, saying stuff like "Tech doesn’t free workers; it forces them to do more in the same amount of time, for the same rate of pay or less". What? Is the author unaware of what average labor hours were like before the industrial revolution? AI is clearly going to be hugely net positive for white-collar (and with robots eventually blue-collar) workers in the near future (it already is for many).